The Arkansaw traveler., 1887-09-03
PRECIOUS MEMORIES.
RY IKE rHILKlNS.

uiHdtciNt pN FASul Eulc Ot NtNAiS rule, and he dies. From the cradle to the grave the souls impulses answer to the heart beat. To live, then, is to love. The babe, the child, the youth sweet young womanhood, manly pride and old sge-are each incluthed with this necessary of being, But In the cycles of eternal change, by which the finite soul is lifted in mounting spirals toward the intinity love is forever losing its precious things forever burying its dead, forever mourning its never returning past.
 The babe loses its sweet life- fount- aims, and awakes to its first great sor- rows; the child sobs convulSively over his dead bird, wecps for his lost kitten. or sits disconsolate amid his broken playthings. Youth, manhood and old age find no exception. Each has to move onward in the great march of being, and each has to leave precious things scattered along the by paths by which he may return no more, and back to which the heart will go on secret pilgrimages.
 And so, in every heart, there are secret chambers, the walls of which are hung with the drapery and mem- orials of the past. Love treasures fill the cabinet of ebony sweet faces, long ago forgotten by the world, smile tranquilly from golden incasements, and voices are heard therein--dear fa- miliar voices, whose musical cadcnccs died on the ears in past time far away. There are many entrances to this chamber. but only one foot may pass the threshold. It is sacred to the individual, and the owner goes in and out at will. often in the day time, but oftener in the night seasons The turning of leaf in some treasured volume, on which single word, in delicate pencil lines. has been traced. will unlock the door of this memorial chamber and recall precious recollcc- tions of the past. A drawer. rarely visited, yields to the impulses of q mothers hand. and there lies tiny stocking. Il small white plume once nodding in snowy hat, a shoe, or bro ken toy, and the secret door opens. A mothers eyes are looking into the past. She is living again, but mourn fully, in the buried years that have no resurrection except this. o. she is in an artists room, where faces look down upon her from walls, or into her eyes from easel and portfolio and fond imagination transforms the fca- tares of beautiful childhood into an absent living boy, the ilutter of whose curls was suddenly lost to sight in the very budding of his years. Very gently she stands, almost placidly she gazes at the picture; there are no signs of deep emotions; not even a dewy tear. But the door of the se- cret chamber has been unlocked-sh she has entered in and stands amid her precious memorials.
 And the wife, as the mother, has her memorial chamber, where, amid childhood's treasures, and girlhood's $ aspiring fancies, are enshrined the memories of looks, tones and words, so full of golden promise that the present of her life seems almost sterile in comparison, and sine weeps often, in this retirement of soul amid its best things, forever embalmed in the unrelenting past.
 And as it is with these, so it is with all. There is not mortal who does not enter, al times, among the broken images, dethroned idols and buried hopes of years gone by, and gaze with sad yet sweet pleasure upon beauty which cannot die-beauty which love has made as immortal as life.
 Precious memories of the past {. How very dear they are! All in them that is of the earth earthly has faded and died but the spiritual and the heavenly remain proof against time and change. Thrice blessed are they who, as the earthly fails, leaving too often, but the memory of the frail, sad, wounded hearts as it broke, have strength to lift the eyes upward, and vision clear enough to penetrate the veil, and see those real things in heaven of which only the unsubstan- tial, earthly forms have been visible Human love is first given, but only 1 that it may form receptacle for di- vine love. Natural love first rules the heart, but only to prepare a kingdom in which the spiritual love may reign. And SO, in those "cycles of eternal change" the heart is purified. Happy they whose memorials of the past are but transparent vessels, radi- ant with terrestial light-whose dead past, over which the hearts have | II l.&t changed into living future, when every lost treasure is safely garnered. -The Colonel.